Today was yet another windy day so leaving Nigel still cabled tied to the roof we turned to the testing the new power distribution board and fixing the roof webcam. The power distribution board worked just dandy so I went back to working on software while Jon constructed a new whiz bang window heater for the roof web camera - an engineering master piece - made of some coolant hose inside the PVC pipe, a fan at the bottom of the heatsink, some bits of wood and a lot of gaff tape.

We heard an explosion when we left the AASTINO for lunch today, it sounded suspiciously like the sound a Stirling engine would make if it decided to blow up. It was either that or the ice core drillers had just blown up some dynamite. Although we didn't really want to know if the former had just happened we trudged back to the AASTINO and had a look inside. Surely we couldn't have blown up the AASTINO only days after Papa Smurf had left - nope everything was fine, it was the drillers. They had received 100kg of dynamite when the traverse came and they're not afraid to use it. The idea is to put some down a hole, explode it and try to work out how far they are from the bottom of the ice. Sounds like fun. The explosion they had let off as we were leaving the AASTINO only used 2.5kg of dynamite and unfortunately didn't give them the results they were after...more dynamite is required.

Each night at the station a film in Italian is shown - we normally give it a miss due to a few language problems. Tonight however someone picked up an English version of "Chopper" which Jon encouraged them to put on. The room started with about 15 people in it...10 minutes later Jon and I were laughing and about 5 people had dissappeared...by the end of the movie Jon, a British driller and I were the only ones left. Even for the the Italians who can understand English, Australian is a bit difficult.
- Suze